WhySkeletonRacingIsSoBrutalontheBody

SKELETON

By CLIVE THOMPSONIllustrations by TATSURO KIUCHIFEB. 9, 2018

The spectacle of human bodies on an ice track, hurtling headfirst at speeds of up to 90 m.p.h., can make skeleton unsettling enough merely to watch. For the athletes, it’s even more extreme. Each of the three phases of a run comes with its own punishing demands.

The start

A run in skeleton — a relatively new Olympic sport that, after featuring in the 1928 and 1948 games, hibernated for almost six decades before re-emerging in 2002 — begins with a burst of adrenaline-fueled, track-and-field intensity. Athletes push their sled frantically for about 50 meters and then leap aboard for the descent. It’s their one chance to generate velocity before gravity takes over.

“Our engine is our push at the start,” says Dave Greszczyszyn, Canada’s top-ranked male skeleton athlete. It’s a pretty awkward way to run, he adds — Greszczyszyn, who is 6-foot-3, must race as fast as possible crouched over, with one hand pushing a sled that itself weighs a full 70 pounds. To keep from slipping, he wears shoes with hundreds of fine, needlelike spikes. “Your hamstrings are working at both ends,” he says.

Illustration by Tatsuro Kiuchi

Straightaways

The margin of victory is typically mere hundredths of a second. As a result, “skeleton is a sport of ‘Who makes the fewest mistakes?’” says Katie Tannenbaum, a skeleton athlete from the Virgin Islands.

That means packing your body down as aerodynamically as possible onto the sled. Because the helmet and shoulders produce most of the air resistance, athletes tuck their head down until it’s nearly touching the ice — while simultaneously arching their eyesight upward, so they can see where they’re going. “It’s really uncomfortable,” Tannenbaum says. “Try doing it for more than a few seconds.” Meanwhile, she’s also flattening her shoulders down on the sled.

Unlike a bobsled, a skeleton sled has no steering mechanism; it’s just a metal frame covered with carbon fiber with runners. To change direction, athletes shift their body with their knees and shoulders, altering the center of gravity and flexing the board slightly. The smallest of perturbations can have a significant effect.

“There are even times when I just use my eyes,” Tannenbaum notes — that tiny movement can alter her posture enough to steer. “Where you look, you go,” she says. If she needs a more drastic change of direction, she’ll touch her toes to the ice, typically done only during turns. The goal is to steer as little as possible in the straightaways, because any steering will — however slightly — slow the sled.

The ride looks smooth. But it’s a teeth-rattling ordeal. “You’re so close to the ice that any little bump, you feel it,” Tannenbaum says.

Illustration by Tatsuro Kiuchi

Turns

Corners are where skeleton racing is the most physically brutal. A tight turn can produce G-forces, or “pressures,” of up to five times normal. (For perspective, consider that astronauts lifting off on a rocket experience only about three G-forces.) “We compare it to a contact sport,” says Matt Antoine, a member of this year’s U.S. Olympic skeleton team. Part of the challenge is how quickly the pressures hit: In a few milliseconds, your head suddenly feels as heavy as a bowling ball, and keeping it upright — and away from the ice — is a struggle.

“When you go right through a corner with four to five Gs of pressures, it’s instantaneous,” Antoine says. “People smack their faces on the ice, concussions happen.” The shoulders, too, are beaten up as they hit the ice.

In the corners, the G-forces are trying to push the sled as high as possible. But going up too far wastes energy — so Antoine fights to keep his sled low, in order to harness the curve’s momentum and slingshot out at an angle ideal for entering the next turn. Each skeleton track has a theoretically “perfect” route, with optimal angles of entry and exit for each turn, which the athletes aim for but never quite achieve.

The sport beats you up. Fighting the G-forces quickly wears down the neck muscles, while the vibrations and impacts leave the rest of the body sore. The need to make constant, split-second decisions at high speed leaves athletes psychologically depleted, too.

“You pretty much never do more than three tracks a day,” Antoine says. “You can’t handle it.”

Correction February 2, 2018

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the composition of the skeleton sled. It is made up of a metal frame with a carbon-fiber underside, not just carbon fiber.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian and the author of “Smarter Than You Think.” His last feature for the magazine was about Minecraft.Tatsuro Kiuchi is an illustrator and a painter based in Tokyo who is known for illustrated children’s books and advertisement work.

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